layered painting – Art Spiel

June 3, 2026June 13, 2026, by Etty Yaniv

Maria Gil Lucientes: Letting the Materials Misbehave

Maria Gil Lucientes, Circles series backdrop

Maria Gil Lucientes paints in the slim margin where a system starts to come undone. She begins with a constraint, a single color, a periodic screen, a piece of medical gauze, then lets the materials misbehave. In Pareidolia, gauze shifted by air becomes the suggestion of a face. A Spanish-born painter who studied mathematics, physics, and computer science before a decade in tech, Lucientes brings a system-builder’s discipline to a practice that hinges on chance. Here, she reflects on the path from science to painting, the dialogue between control and surprise in her process, and the new Moiré series taking shape in her studio.

June 1, 2026June 1, 2026, by Taylor Bielecki

Kosuke Kawahara’s Without Innocence, Dissecting and Reassembling at RAINRAIN Gallery

Stepping into the exhibition Without Innocence at RAINRAIN gallery, you are greeted with a plethora of various mediums, ideas, influences, and experimentations. The paintings carry with them several levels of looking, small details to explore, and multiple dimensions within the edges. The photographs set the scene, allowing you to enter another space just as the paintings do, left to explore the worlds that Kawahara creates and builds within it all. The press release introduces a quote from Donna Haraway’s A Cyborg Manifesto, “…we are living through a movement from an organic, industrial society to a polymorphous, information system—from all work to all play, a deadly game (p 28).” This statement lingers alongside my thoughts throughout the exhibition, as I begin to notice more details, connections, and mechanisms that make this exhibition immensely similar to a cyborg in the making. Kawahara takes pieces of the body and fractions of different spaces within the canvas to build something entirely new out of all of these information systems.

April 22, 2026April 21, 2026, by Etty Yaniv

Cynthia Pareja Dubin at the Oyster Point Hotel

The Artist in Residence program at The Oyster Point Hotel was launched in 2020 and curated by Ellen Martin, with the support of Kevin Barry, the hotel’s President. Its premise is straightforward: contemporary art belongs not only in galleries but in the spaces where people actually live, rest, and move through their days. Each year, a selected artist’s work inhabits the hotel’s guest rooms, common areas, and the fabric of the place itself, encountered by thousands of visitors during their stay.

March 25, 2025March 24, 2025, by Anna Shukeylo

Raymond Saá at Morgan Lehman

On the 4th floor of one of Chelsea’s heavily trafficked art buildings, Morgan Lehman gallery is presenting a jazzy solo exhibition, Pan Con Timba, by abstract, musically-influenced painter Raymond Saá. This exhibition brings together the artist’s love for music that he skillfully reflects in his rhythmic paintings and spice of his Cuban background; after all , Pan Con Timba is not only a jazz song that inspired Saá, but also a famous Cuban sandwich with guava preserves.

January 15, 2024January 15, 2024, by Mary McCoy

Watershed—Grace Mitchell in conversation with Mary McCoy

HOT AIR

A landscape with a river and a blue sky

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Grace Mitchell-Eternal Return IV, Oil on panel, 30”x30”, 2022

The deep, rich colors and textures of Grace Mitchell’s oil paintings will draw you in, but it’s often the title that sets you thinking. Interweaving layers of color glow through the marsh grasses in her newest series, Watershed Assessment. You could get lost in the sheer beauty of these paintings with their glints of tidal water and shadowy mountains looming in the distance, all saturated with a moist, misty atmosphere that seems to glow with fecundity. But the title gives pause. These lush, luminous landscapes are meant to be “assessed,” and careful observation finds them full of scars and flaws.

August 1, 2022December 30, 2022, by Etty Yaniv

Zachary Keeting: Reconciling Layered Energies

Zachary Keeting *coffee and cigarettes* 2016 acrylic on canvas (triptych) 48” x 124” photo courtesy the artist

In Zachary Keeting’s restless and complex paintings swirls of vivid purples, yellows, and reds float by or contained within geometric shapes of subdued browns and pinkish off-whites. Together they orchestrate distinct rhythms and create a sense of luminosity. Keeting’s alluring colors often generate dynamic pictorial spaces filled with an imaginative array of fragmented forms which remind me of mirror shards prisms against a shifting light, particles in a quantum physics lab, or visual transcriptions of sounds. Although each of these parts, whether biomorphic or geometric, appears to assume a distinct characteristic, the overall sense we get is—what we see now is on the verge of changing within the next second.

May 21, 2022May 21, 2022, by Sara Farrell Okamura

Pauline Decarmo: Exit – the Path to New Beginnings at LABspace

Installation view of *Pauline Decarmo: Exit* at LABspace, 2022, photo courtesy LABspace

Some artists paint stunning abstractions, some artists deftly execute exquisite realistic images, while others ingeniously develop astute conceptual work, but the truly magical art is work that can intelligently create the aura of time, space, and experience. Fortunately Pauline Decarmo, by using any means necessary, does exactly that in her exhibition, Exit, on view at LABspace in Hillsdale NY through May 29.

March 8, 2018May 30, 2020, by Etty Yaniv

Peter Fox – Surface Tension at the Front Room Gallery

Peter Fox, Second self, 2018, courtesy of the artist

“Surface Tension”, Peter Fox’s third solo exhibition with Front Room gallery features a series of new paintings in which he manifests a controlled self-reflexive state – the layered painting application itself defines form and gesture. In this new series Fox has reduced his palette to earth tones, creating a rich counterpoint – burnt siennas, dark browns and yellow ochres play off cool blues in Payne’s grey. Continue reading “Peter Fox – Surface Tension at the Front Room Gallery”